Where the Openings and Closings Concentrated

Some more data from GM’s retail survey! Today GM will drill down a little on the openings and closings that took place between November 2019 and now. As mentioned last week, GM counted 68 openings and 123 closings. Here’s where they were:

As you can see, by far the largest category of openings was in restaurants, where there were 22. Clothing stores came in a distant second at 11, and salons trailing at 6. The rest were scattered across a bunch of different categories.

(GM should note here that he did not capture stores that opened and then closed during the gap. There were some, for instance Harper Macaw briefly had a store on M St. But for consistency’s sake, GM did not attempt to capture them.)

The closures had a fairly similar distribution:

Again, restaurants led the pack at 34. But clothing stores were closer behind at 24. Salons again came in third, with 7. (It’s not all bad: 4 banks closed too.)

As a result, there was a net loss in these three categories of 12 restaurants, 13 clothing stores, and one salon. As a percentage, that was about 9% of restaurants and 13% of clothing stores. Pretty big bite!